Aventuras en Oaxaca

So far, our goal in Oaxaca has been to try and blend in to the culture and not act like tourists but yesterday we might as well been wearing fanny packs and taking pictures like tourists. We got an educational tour of Oaxaca by riding in a nice bus. Our "tour guide" will actually be one of our speaker in the classroom setting. His name is Oliver and he was born in Germany but has lived in both the United States and Mexico. Oliver is very intelligent and had a really dry sense of humor, especially talking about the differences in class level in Mexican society.

Our tour started at the lookout point over Oaxaca and we got to see the whole city. I guess Mexican urban sprawl is much different than the United States. Typically in the United States, the areas surrounding the city are nicer property like the suburbs. In Oaxaca, most of the people who move to the outskirts of the city are impoverished and looking for a place to live. Property is owned privately in some areas and publicly (by the government) in others (both private and public are like the United States), but most of the property is owned by the community. Most of the areas around the city are owned by the community, so squatter groups will sometimes move out there and set up camp. (The government doesn't do much as long as the community agrees to vote for the political party in power)

On the tour we saw a squatter community who had just arrived a few days ago... the Spanish word for squatters is actually paracaídas (parachuters) because they seem to arrive like parachuters would... out of nowhere (one day there is nothing and the next day there is a squatter town). Ironically, right across from the squatter village, there was government housing. Mexico’s economy and tax structure is very different from the United States…

WARNING!! WARNING!!!(This may be a boring economic explanation so if you don’t want to read about it skip to the next paragraph) Every single person in the Mexican “formal economy” has a right to a house and free health care. But… only about 40% of all the people are in the formal economy (made up of mostly people in the unions… ie teachers union and electrician union) So… what does this mean… First of all, only the people in the formal economy are taxed BUT all of their tax money goes back into funding stuff for ONLY the people in the formal economy. So if you work for a union or are in the formal economy, you get to live in really nice government housing with protective fences… also free health care etc. So the government takes care of all the people in the formal economy (even after they retire) But, everyone else (even many of my teachers at SIT who aren’t involved in the union) who is in the informal economy gets no government assistance. So there is a very visible difference in the living conditions between many in the formal economy and the informal economy.

One of the major problems in Oaxaca is lack of clean water. Yesterday, we learned why the program directors asked us not to flush our toilets and why we aren't supposed to drink the water or eat fruit that has been washed in the water. In Oaxaca, they have no water distillation plant so all of the waste (human and chemical) are dumped into a river. We visited the river, where some of the very impoverished people still wash their clothes and get drinking water. It wasn’t too smelly because the recent rainwater had diluted the smell, but our guide said there are days were the smell is pretty strong. Because the river is used as a dump, water is very limited in the city so Oaxaca is technically under a “water shortage.” Most houses only get water every 3 days and have to fill up big water containers to store all the water they may need.

However, not all the neighborhoods are lacking water. The last place we visited in the city was the political housing. After Oaxaca started becoming more populated, many of the political hot shots and their families moved up into the mountains to a quieter place with its own water supply. The difference between the streets up there and the streets in the main city and outskirts is huge. Up in the mountains, the houses are bigger and more spaced apart. Also, there is no graffiti on the walls (down in the city almost every building is covered with 5 to 20 signatures from graffiti artists). And the most noticeable difference is the lack of “city” sound. It’s very peaceful, but also very different than the reality that the majority of Oaxacans lifestyles.

Well, the tour was very educational, but tomorrow we are going on our own individual tours… Two person teams are going on a kind of scavenger hunt to find a cultural place throughout the city and surrounding neighborhoods. I’ll also be posting pictures of my tour! Hasta luego!!